Some conventional communication systems are known to support wireless and wireline communication between wireless and/or wireline communication devices. Such communication systems range from national and/or international cellular telephone systems to the Internet, and to point-to-point in-home wireless networks. Each type of communication system is designed, and hence operates, in accordance with relevant communication standards. For instance, wireless communication systems may operate in accordance with one or more standards including, but not limited to, IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, advanced mobile phone services (AMPS), digital AMPS, global system for mobile communications (GSM), code division multiple access (CDMA), local multi-point distribution systems (LMDS), multi-channel-multi-point distribution systems (MMDS), and/or variations thereof.
Depending on the type of wireless communication system, a wireless communication device, for example, a cellular telephone, two-way radio, personal digital assistant (PDA), personal computer (PC), laptop computer, or home entertainment equipment, communicates directly or indirectly with other wireless communication devices. For direct communications, also known as point-to-point communications, the participating wireless communication devices tune their receivers and transmitters to the same channel, or channels, and communicate via those channel(s). Each channel may utilize one or more of the plurality of radio frequency (RF) carriers of the wireless communication system. For indirect wireless communication, each wireless communication device communicates directly with an associated base station, for example, for cellular services, and/or an associated access point, for example, for an in-home or in-building wireless network, via an assigned channel or channels.
In order for each wireless communication device to participate in a wireless communication session, it utilizes a built-in radio transceiver, which comprises a receiver and a transmitter, or it is coupled to an associated radio transceiver, for example, a station for in-home and/or in-building wireless communication networks, or a RF modem. The transmitter converts data into RF signals by modulating the data in accordance with the particular wireless communication standard. However, different communication systems may use different standards, for example, the IEEE 802.11 standard and the Bluetooth standard, which may share the same RF spectrum.
In order to alleviate signal interference from sharing an RF spectrum with other communication systems, the Bluetooth standard allows frequency hopping where information is transmitted at various frequencies. In this manner, the energy of the transmitted signal is spread across the RF spectrum in 79 channels with each channel separated by 1 MHz, between 2.402 GHz and 2.480 GHz. The Bluetooth standard allows 1600 frequency hops per second. The advantage of the frequency hopping system is that it spreads information across a wide band of frequencies. Therefore, signals transmitted by other systems using a portion of the same frequency spectrum may appear to be noise to only some of the frequencies used by Bluetooth in frequency hopping. Similarly, only a portion of Bluetooth transmission may interfere with signals transmitted by other systems.
Two or more Bluetooth devices, up to a total of eight devices, may comprise a piconet with one master device and up to seven slave devices. The piconet may share a common communication data channel that presently may have a total capacity of 1 megabits per second (Mbps), up to a theoretical maximum of 3 Mbps. This data channel is divided in to time slots of 625 microseconds. Although a master device may initiate contact with any slave device, a slave device may only respond to a master device. A piconet link between a master device and a slave device may be either synchronous connectionless oriented (SCO) or asynchronous connectionless (ACL). The piconet may support up to three SCO links, and any remaining bandwidth may be utilized by ACL links.
At the present time, a host device, or a host platform, for example, a personal computer (PC), may use the Bluetooth standard for a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse applications. A single Bluetooth communication device on the PC may transmit and receive signals related to the wireless keyboard and the wireless mouse. However, as Bluetooth becomes more ubiquitous, many other Bluetooth applications, such as voice communication, and/or audio and/or video data transfer, may be added to the PC. The Bluetooth applications on the PC may then be bandwidth limited. Therefore, the PC may require more than one Bluetooth communication device in order to accommodate the additional devices that wish to communicate via the Bluetooth standard. This may lead to additional interference among the different Bluetooth communication devices that may be transmitting at the same time.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.